MUSIC AND COMPUTERS

Chapter:

CHAPTER 10 Millennium's End

Source:

MUSIC IN THE LATE TWENTIETH CENTURY

Author(s):

Richard Taruskin

But the medium least dependent on notation had always been electronic music, which can bypass the performance process as well
as the pencil-and-paper process. And no medium was more thoroughly transformed during the 1980s than electronic music, thanks
to the advent of personal computers, the very thing that Pierre Boulez was so determined to stave off. From the perspective
of midcentury modernism he was right to fear it. Personal computers revolutionized every aspect of music making from composition
(including nonelectronic composition) to performance to distribution to consumption. And at every level their effect has been
to simplify and democratize the art. But in the process they may have dealt the literate tradition a slow-acting death blow.